A mobile application for cardiac rhythm study

The aim of this paper is the discussion of the main features implemented in an Android application for ECG processing. It was designed to use a mobile phone, connected by Bluetooth to a battery-powered ECG device, as a signal acquisition layer in a Telemedicine platform. The Android application receives the ECG data according to a simple protocol. The Bluetooth pairing process is made by the proposed software following the traditional procedure. ECG data is filtered using a FIR filter. QRS complexes are detected and classified, as premature or not based on the duration of RR intervals. An energy collector, combined with heuristic rules, was implemented to detect QRS complexes. All these information is uploading to a web site using GSM/GPRS network and HTTP protocol. Also, all the data is store in a database implemented in the phone; this feature allows downloading that information into a personal computer to make other studies. The software was programming in Java language using Eclipse SDK and SQLite database engine. The proposed solution has been tested with ten models of Android mobile phones, working without problems. Errors have not been reported in communications. QRS complex detection algorithm was tested with MIT-BIH database and the QRS detection sensitivity was 99,03%.